Strangers from the Sky
Page 2
sense."
"I'm fine. Rig the bosun's chair and don't
bother met"
That sounded like Tatya. Yoshi went to work.
"Odd!" he heard her say, half to herself. "I
can't find a pulse on either of them!" She raised
her voice to make sure he heard her. "I'm
going to start sending them ups'
""them" who?" Yoshi shouted as he scrambled
to rig the rescue harness with its snap-away
stretcher. He didn't expect an answer to that
either. For some reason he couldn't explain he'd been
scanning the horizon since Tatya had gone below,
anticipating company. Certainly they hadn't been
the only ones who'd seen it go down. "At least
tell me what I'm rigging for!"
"The first one's male, approximately
six feet, onesixty to one-seventy pounds,"
Tatya recited, all professional. Yoshi could
hear her sloshing tilde round; the water level was
rising, then. "Unconscious due to blow on the
head, possible concussion. Some second- and
thirddegree burns an tilde damn! None of my
readings on internal organs makes any sense,
and it's too dark down here. We'll have to risk
moving him. You got the full stretcher rigged?"
Yoshi snapped it to the aft hoist and tugged the
lines.
"All set!"
"Okay, lower away. I'm checking the second
one now."
"Male, young what?" Yoshi couldn't resist as
he lowered the stretcher vertically through the hatch.
"Sounds awfully big for a little green man. No
tentacles, extra arms? You sure he isn't an
android? How many heads does he have?"
"Yoshi, dammit!" She sounded more
disappointed than angry.
"Just trying to lighten things up a little. You need some
help lifting him?"
That earned him some of Tatya's favorite
Ukrainian barnyardisms; in practical
application she was stronger than he was. After a
moment he felt her tug the line and started the
foil's auxiliary to begin hoisting her patient out,
guiding the line with his hands so the stretcher wouldn't
bump the hatch.
"Male, young what, Tatya?" he had to ask one
more time.
Fle caught a glimpse of her pale, concerned
face in the cabin below as the stretcher
emerged slowly into the sunlight.
"I'm not sure. You have any relatives on
Mars?"
"dis . . Iocated and if at all possible
retrieved. Standard radiation and microorganism
precautionaries to be implemented. Survivors,
if any, to be quarantined aboard your vessel under
Regulation 17-C until we contact you. Under
no circumstances are you to break radio slience. Do
you copy, Delphinus?"
"We copy, Control," Captain Nyere said
to the
screen. "Commodore, what exactly is it that
we're looking for?"
"Not your concem, Captain. Just follow your
orders."
"And when if we find it?"
"If Regulation 17-C applies, you will stand
by until you receive further orders. If not General
Order 2013, Captain. Methodology your
discretion."
The screen burst into static without so much as a
signoff. Jason Nyere realised he was sweating.
"Jesus!" he whispered. "This is the kind of thing
you have nightmares about. I never
thought it would come down to me. I can't do that!"
"Can't do what?" Sawyer demanded, moving between him
and the vacant screen; Nyere had forgotten she was
there. "General Order 2013 is not in any reg
book still ever read."
"It wouldn't be. The 2000 series is
accessible to command officers only," Nyere said
softly, vaguely. He kept dabbing the perspiration
from his brow and his mustache, but it didn't help. He
stared at his sodden handkerchief as if he'd never seen
it before. "it's Flag Officers' Handbook,
crisis activated only. It's none of
your I told you not to listen in!"
A number of smart-ass retorts sprang
to Sawyer's lips; she clamped her rather horsey
teeth down on them and didn't speak. She'd seen
Jason stare down the muzzle of a loaded neutron
cannon without breaking a sweat.
She'd never seen him look this frightened.
Unobtrusively she moved behind him and
began maw saging his shoulders. If any of the
crew stumbled in now, there'd be hell to pay for
insinuations. Let them dare. If one old friend
couldn't comfort another in times of stress
"Jason, what is 2013?"
"Two-oh-one-three and I shouldn't be telling you
this," he said tiredly, slumped in his chair,
unresponsive to her ministrations, "is a
contingency plan for possible alien invasion."
Melody's hands stopped. She laughed.
"You mean they're sending us out to look for a flying
saucer? I don't believe it!"
Jason nodded dismally.
"Believe it. Ever since the first UFO
sightings, there's been a contingency plan of
one kind or another on the books to contain,
assess, and, if necessary, destroy any incursion from
beyond our solar system. Even when it was passed off as
the hallucinations of a few crackpots, there was that much
credence given to it. Now that we're capable of moving
out of the system ourselves, now that we've been sending
messages for over a century, it seems all the
more likely that someone or something is going to answer
us."
He paused. He was saying these things, his life and
his command were being dictated to by them, but he couldn't bring
himself to believe them, nor what he was 9 Ding to have
to do if they were fact.
"Whatever it was that went down out there last night,
Melody, it wasn't one of ours."
Sawyer paced the confines of Delphinus's
fairly roomy captain's cabin, contemplating the
calm and sparkling Pacific, somewhere in which a
supposedly alien spacecraft had gone down the
night before. Chances were it had simply plummeted like
a stone into a pond and that was the end of it. General
Order 2013 would be preempted by something as basic
as gravity and the depths of the ocean floor.
"Why "destroy"?" Melody asked at last.
"I can see if they were hostile. An
invasion force. But they'd hardly come in one ship at
a time, would they? And the order wouldn't have turned you
into the face of Armageddon in the time I've been
sitting here. It's something else, isn't it?"
Nyere smiled wanly, unable to shake his awful
dread.
"You're right. It's nothing so simple as any of
that. What it is is our having a long, considered
look at the
alien or aliens and reporting our findings
to Command. Command then decides if owl Earth is
ready for the first time and for an absolute certainty to know
that such aliens exist."
>
"And if Command decides not?"
"Then it falls upon us to make certain that they and
any witnesses to their arrival" he shook his head,
unbelieving "cease to exist."
"Relatives on Mars?" Yoshi said.
"Tatya his
Whatever comeback Yoshi might have had
was throttled in mid-breath as the first survivor
hove into view in the brilliant sunlight. The
fact was that despite burns and abrasions and
just plain dirt he did look Japanese, at
least at first hurried glance as Yoshi swung the
hoist and lowered the stretcher below decks to move him
off of it and onto one of the bunks. Under closer
scrutiny, though . . .
Yoshi felt his hands go numb and deliberately
shut off the part of his brain that tended to extrapolate
from what he saw to the extremities of what in all
cosmic senses it could mean.
What if Tatya was right?
She was tugging on the line with a kind of urgency,
anxious to get her second patient up, and Yoshi
shrugged off his reverie and forced his hands to work, but even
as he went through the motions, maneuvered the lines,
kept an eye on the water level (another foot
and it would reach the lower edge of the hatch, already the stray
wave lapped insid tilde hurry, Tatya,
hurry!), he still found time to stare over his shoulder at
his newly acquired passenger.
It all havened rather quickly after that. Tatya's
movements, to judge from the craft's renewed
rocking, became little short of frantic. Yoshi
heard her shout something as he
hand-over-handed the stretcher up for the second time, and
had to ask her to repeat.
"I said she seems to have smashed her face
to hell,"
Tatya yelled. "I wanted to warn you. Knowing
how you usually react to blood."
"Don't sweat it!" Yoshi yelled back,
annoyed. It wasn't his fault he was squeamish,
and she didn't have tocombe so superior about it.
He had no time to test his tolerance. Without warning
the foundering craft tilted precipitously off the
barrier, snapping the hawser, which caught Yoshi on
the ankle. He howled in pain as his leg buckled,
refused to work right for some seconds. The craft
lurched and spun and water poured into the open hatch.
Yoshi shoved the laden stretcher unceremoniously
onto the deck, unsnapping it from the harness, which he
flung desperately down into the filling darkness.
"Tatya, now! Grab the line and hold on!"
The auxiliary chugged and wheezed as it pulled
Tatya upstream against the current. Yoshi flung
her, gasping, drenched, and cursing onto the deck,
left her to recover on her own while he veered the
bucking hydrofoil as far away from the sucking
maelstrom of the sinking craft as he could.
In an instant it was over. The sea was calm, and
except for a slight fraying of the barrier cables, the
spacecraft might never have been.
"You all right?" Yoshi asked over his shoulder,
pointing the foil toward home.
"Waterlogged," Tatya admitted, hugging him
squishily, water and kelp strands streaming out of her
hair. "You?"
"Hawser damn near busted my ankle." He
showed her the ugly red swelling that would be three
shades of purple by nightfall. "Bruised my
backside. Damaged my pride. I'll live.
Better have a look at your patients."
Something in the way he said it had Tatya below in a
flash. Yoshi said nothing more, pretended not to look as
she examined them for the first time in full light.
"Yoshi, come here a minute," he heard her
say, her
voice on the last calm edge of panic and
beginning to fray. "Turn off the damn engine and
come here!"
He did. She held out her hands to him in the
sunlight. Considering the extent of the
survivors' injuries she'd expected blood, but
this
"Tell me I'm not crazy," she pleaded.
"Tell me I'm really seeing this."
"You're not crazy, Tatya. I see it too.
I saw it when you sent the first one up."
"Bozbemoi!" Tatya breathed. "It's
green!"
"Boy, do I remember that feeling!" McCoy
sat warming himself at the fire in Jim Kirk's
apartment. "First time I saw surgery on a
Vulcan I couldn't have been more than a
first-year med student, never been offworld, didn't
know a Vulcan to speak to I'm telling you, I
couldn't make a fist for the rest of the day! It was so
strange! You expect blood to be red, dammit,
no matter what the textbooks tell you."
It was evening. Kirk had put in a full day at
the Admiralty. Spock was out on Enterprise for the
next several weeks, taking his cadets through
maneuvers. McCoy as usual managed to make
himself to home wherever he was. He'd been telling
Kirk about Strangers from the Sky, hoping to pique
the amateur historian's curiosity.
"We've all had our moments of
strangeness with other species, Bones," Jim
Kirk said quietly, gazing into the fire. For some
reason the topic made him uneasy. "And God
knows there's been enough written on the subject, from
abstracts in Xenopsych Today to those interspecies
biology texts we used to pass around when we were
kids. From the sound of it, this book of yours seems
to fall somewhere in between."
McCoy cocked an eyebrow at him.
"That's a helluvan assumption from someone who
hasn't read it."
"Nor do I intend to," Kirk replied
pleasantly enough. "That particular era doesn't
interest me. Never has. I don't know why, but
well. Freshen your drink?"
"Don't know what you're missing!" McCoy
grumbled, keeping a weather eye on the level of the
bourbon as Kirk poured.
"I remember the last book you recommended,"
Kirk said. Planetside the good doctor found far
more leisure for reading one of his tamer vices than
he did on double Sickbay shifts in space.
"Gave me nightmares for weeks. You know
the one I mean The Last Reflection?"
"The Final Reflection," McCoy corrected
him. "Dammit, Jim, you're getting soft!
Tell me that wasn't one of the most electrifying
docudramas you ever read. Tell me you didn't
enjoy it."
"It was and I did," Kirk acknowledged. "I just
didn't like the thoughts it left me with afterward."
"Such as?"
"Such as how there really are no Good Guys and
Bad Guys. Just a lot of people falling over each
other trying to do what they think is right. And about how
fragile history is."
He had caught his breath then, the way he always
did when he was about to spin off on one of his
poetical monologues. McCoy settled back
and let him fly, along for the ride. Damned if the
man c
ouldn't talk you to the gates of hell if you
let him.
"I got to thinking about how one individual can
sometimes change the course of history," Kirk was
saying. "How if Krenn had been the kind of
stereotype Klingon we'd come to expect, if
Tagore had been a lesser human, we might have
destroyed each other long ago. You read
books like that and you realize how fragile the whole
structure is. The old theory that if Hitler
hadn't been born, Earth's Second World War
wouldn't have happened. Or that without Khan Singh
there'd have been no Third his
was and if the archduke hadn't been assassinated
at Sarajevo, there'd have been no First and no
reason for the other two," McCoy cut in.
"Bull! Jim, you don't really believe all that
hokum? War was the human condition until we
outgrew it, Hitler or no. That
one-man-as-catalyst theory is a lot of horse
hockey!"
Kirk shrugged. "I don't know that for sure.
Sometimes it seems so much hinges on little things. One
small incident, one misspoken word, one tiny
misinterpreted gesture and the whole structure
collapses. When I think of how much power we have,
and how little common sense, I get the shakes."
"Which is exactly why you'll love this book,
Jim," McCoy promised. "It deals with an
incident none of us knew about until now. Our first
real contact with alien life, the one the
textbooks never told us about, and how we almost
botched it so completely we might never have tried it
again. Might have curled up in our little isolationist
nest and pulled the covers over our heads and let
history and the Federation pass us by."
"I don't buy that, Bones," Jim Kirk
said, moving about the room winding those of his antique
clocks that needed winding, a nightly ritual.
"Sounds like a pretty big fish story to me."
"Not if you consider the era we're talking about,"
McCoy argued. "Earth was less than fifty
years away from Khan's war, had just begun to consider
itself a united world, and it had its growing pains. People still
living who'd lost family and friends in that war and could
never be reconciled, some cities still in ruins, a
lot of grievances and old vendettas still festering.
Depending on how you looked at it, it was either the best
or the worst time for a bunch of aliens to come dropping